I am having a world of trouble trying to figure out this one complicated stitch. The project is Robin Melanson's "Filigree" fingerless gloves, as featured on the cover of the book I'm working from: Knitting New Mittens and Gloves

Anyways, the whole pattern consists of four rows of knitting in the round, the second row involves this crazy technique where you are supposed to "k4tog, p4tog into these 4 sts" and when you are done the row, you should have half the original sts left.

I've tried knitting through the front, then the back, or knitting then slipping them off and purling, but everything I've tried makes a gigantic mess of things and sure as heck doesn't look like the picture :/

Here's another pic of someone's project who successfully managed to figure out what was going on :p

I recently purchased the book and the picture of the gloves is pretty.

I went to the errata page for the book at the HNA:stc website (http://www.hnabooks.com/page/stc_craft_errata) just to make sure there wasn't a typo for that particular pattern (there was only one pattern (Glaistig) listed, but that could mean they just haven't spotted any others yet).

On to your problem though, the decrease you are working will probably seem/feel a bit clumsy. However, this is what I think the instructions are trying to get you to do. First knit a grouping of 4 stitches together at one time (like knit 2 together only with 4 sts instead of 2) do not remove those stitches from the left hand needle, instead go back into the stitches purlwise (with the working yarn in front) and re-work those same 4 stitches by purling through all 4 of them at the same time. The more stitches that are worked together, the more awkward the move is to execute sometimes.

Hey - that explanation is perfect! I was successful with knitting a few rows in this pattern and the stitch looks great. It really is a pretty design, but for the life of me I just wasn't able to figure it out. It's not as clumsy as you might think because you are supposed to knit the row before it doubling the yarn around the needle, then slipping this off when you are done for some extra wiggle room with this complicated stitch